“Well, if hes such a wizard, and his predictions are so golden, I guess you and the rest of us can just quit working and make an outstanding living just betting his predictions, right?”

No, markets only work when their are those who make predictions that turn out to be wrong. Those players who are best at analyzing data usually make the more accurate predictions and win most of the time.

Eventually, those who are inferior at analyzing data will wash out of the market and those who are best will thrive.

In the end, maybe 5-10% of the players will truly succeed and all other players will perish or hardly survive.

Even those who are best at analyzing data and making predictions are wrong once in a while.

If I were to bet on someone predicting which baseball prospects will be the best MLB players, who will win an election, or who will execute the best trading strategies or who will win the most money at poker, I will go with Nate Silver.

If I were to bet on someone predicting which baseball prospects will be the best MLB players, who will win an election, or who will execute the best trading strategies or who will win the most money at poker, I will go with Nate Silver.

Again with this poker rubbish. The guy has never even cashed in a significant tournament in his entire life.

Are you Silver's publicist or something? I see you just joined less than two months ago, which is more than a little suspicious to me, considering how long F.R. has been around.

28 posted on 01/13/2013 5:30:48 PM PST by jpl
(The government spent another half a million bucks in the time it just took you to read this tagline.)

Exactly my point. You are likely very savvy, and therefore do not bet on the basis of someone else’s predictions, recognizing that they are making calculated guesses - and that even the best calculated guesses have significant margins of error. There are a ton of people in the world who have much, much more statistical expertise than those like Nate Silver, or any of the other lay press personalities. Further, many of these people have access to computing power beyond what most, if not all of us have ever had access to, but they are not routinely wagering themselves to riches on the basis of their mathematical powers of prediction. There's a lot of variability in the world, and that's wonderful.

That said, I will make a prediction, in part based on the inherent variability, uniqueness, and need for individuality of each human being - that every human experiment based on the Marxist model, or variation thereof, will eventually fail, and that all who cavort as intellectually superior because they espouse such models will be proved wrong by history.